Penny Merriments –
Street Songs of 17th Century England
The Courtiers Health, or The Merry Boys of
the Times [2:40] The Country Lass [4:07] The Crost People, or A Good Misfortune [7:12]
The Countryman’s Joy [2:44] Seldom Cleanly [3:38] A Merry Jest of John Thomson and Jakaman His
Wife [4:45] The Seven Merry Wives of London, or The Gossips
Complaint [4:01] Old England Grown New [2:50] Good Advice to Batchelors, How to Court and
Obtain a Young Lass [3:07] Neptune’s Raging Fury [3:13] The North Country Lovers [4:18] The Lunatick Lover [4:08] The Downfall of Dancing [6:14] The Saint Turn’d Sinner [3:51] And Old Song on the Spanish Armada [2:07]
The Female Captain, or The Counterfeit Bridegroom
[4:25] London Mourning in Ashes [4:07] The Famous Ratcatcher [2:57]
The City Waites
Recorded at St Paul’s Church, Southgate, London,
5th-6th September 2004
NAXOS 8.557672 [70:25]

The City Waites here
present a selection of simple but enjoyable
streets songs from the seventeen century.
The soloists are all experts in their
fields – Lucy Skeaping, Douglas Wootton
and Roderick Skeaping as vocalists,
and Robin Jeffrey, Michael Brain, Roderick
Skeaping again and Nicholas Perry on
a wide range of instruments from the
cittern and viol to the bass curtal
and bagpipes.

The songs are all Broadside
Ballads – a kind of musical newspaper,
printed in large quantities, cheap,
easily available and ubiquitous. The
texts deal with a range of subjects
from current affairs – including songs
on historical events such as the fire
of London and the Spanish Armada - to
comedy (such as traditional country
bumpkin jokes), and love songs – the
latter often remarkably crude. I was
interested to come across Old England
Grown New – a song to the tune of
Greensleeves, but the words of
which are remarkably relevant today.

The City Waites present
what one imagines might be very authentic-sounding
performances of these songs. The men
have rough, raw, lusty voices that bring
the songs to life, and Lucy Skeaping
has a pretty, sweet voice that would
not go amiss on a Restoration maid –
listen to her aptly dulcet tones in
Country Lass, for example. Sometimes
the singers half speak, half sing –
as Lucy Skeaping does in Seldom Cleanly,
and Wootton in Good advice to Bachelors
– which is very effective and tends
to give a good flavour of the period.
The local accents occasionally adopted
are excellent, too, such as by Roderick
Skeaping in The Countryman’s Joy.

I particularly enjoyed
Neptune’s Raging Fury - a lovely
nautical song from all voices, as well
Roderick Skeaping’s beautifully dark,
deep, black voice in The Lunatick
Lover, and the concluding lively
The Famous Ratcatcher.

These songs are great
fun, and all the performers seem to
thoroughly enjoy themselves, with energetic
and vivacious renditions. Interesting
and informative notes from Lucy Skeaping
about the history, use, popularity and
performance (and so on) of these songs
add to the pleasure of listening to
the disc. I did, however, find towards
the end of the disc that it was getting
a bit too much… these songs are better
in smaller bites than in over an hour’s
worth’s concentrated listening. And
a final warning - the words could cause
offence!

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